Sunday, April 29, 2007

Iraq Chaos Causes Bush to Revise War Projections

On Saturday the NY Times reported that President Bush is "scaling back expectations for the Iraqi government" and won't report on the "surge" until at least September.

The President is delaying because he refuses to acknowledge that his "surge", the latest attempt to salvage the Iraq quagmire, is failing just like the U.S “reconstruction” of Iraq, an oxymoron if there ever was one.

The $30 billion reconstruction effort was designed to complement the military effort to stabilize Iraq. Its official goals were to allow the government to function, revitalize the economy, including the oil industry whose revenues would finance the war, and promote good will toward the United States.

But inspectors for a federal oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, have found that in a sampling of eight projects across the country that the United States had declared successes, seven were no longer operating as designed because of plumbing and electrical failures, lack of proper maintenance, apparent looting and expensive equipment that lay idle.

These new findings come after years of insistence by the President, Vice President, American officials in Baghdad and pro-war activists that too much attention has been paid to the failures in Iraq and not enough to the successes. You’ve surely seen the emails of smiling Iraqi children and rebuilt communities! This new report undermines that pro- war hype and recalls Bob Dylan's refrain "...there's no success like failure. And that failure's no success at all."

Bush is also "scaling back expectations for the Iraqi government" because he surely knows, as Frank Rich reports, that there is none: "... the Maliki “government” can’t meet any benchmarks, even if they were enforced, because that government exists only as a fictional White House talking point. As Gen. Barry McCaffrey said last week, this government doesn’t fully control a single province. Its Parliament, now approaching a scheduled summer recess, has passed no major legislation in months. Iraq’s sole recent democratic achievement is to ban the release of civilian casualty figures, lest they challenge White House happy talk about “progress” in Iraq."

In Saudi Arabia, 172 Al Qeada suspects were arrested for planning to blow up oil installations, and kill politicians- additional proof, as if it were needed, that the US venture in Iraq is in shambles. Buried in the Times report on these developments was an admission that the US occupation of Iraqi was generating more terrorist recruits: “The chaos in Iraq has fueled radical ideology among the region’s youth, while providing an environment for militants to train…Officials said that the suspects had trained abroad, in Somalia, Afghanistan and especially Iraq.'It is the beginning of jihadi operations leaking out of Iraq,' said Abdul Azizal-Qassim, a retired Saudi judge and moderate Islamic activist. 'It is clear that this is some of the effects of what is happening in Iraq, in terms of training and in terms of learning from the Iraqi experience.'”

So the War continues, to paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, longer now than US military operations in WWII, reconstruction has failed, and the world is less safe than it was before 9/11 as the US occupation of Iraq generates more and more terrorists! This is the world that the neo-cons and their ideological president have created!